


I Want Your Midnights

by thedenouement



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: But Clexa Endgame, F/F, F/M, Getting Back Together, Idiots in Love, Light Angst, Minor Finn Collins/Clarke Griffin, New Year's Eve, New Year's Kiss, angstier than intended but still light, at the beginning, it's cute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-27 07:42:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13243650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedenouement/pseuds/thedenouement
Summary: It’s New Year’s Eve 2014 and Clarke Griffin’s resolution is Lexa Woods.Three years later, separated by new love and old tragedies, the two unwittingly reconnect at a party, determined to right their wrongs and to have their midnight kiss.





	I Want Your Midnights

**Author's Note:**

> Didn't quite finish this for New Year's but better late than never.

**_Don’t read the last page, but I stay when you’re lost and I’m scared and you’re turning away. I want your midnights. But I’ll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year’s Day._**

**_\- Taylor Swift, New Year's Day_ **

Clarke twisted her wheat-blonde locks around her fingers, holding them to the back of her head in a low maintenance up-do that showed off her dress and examining herself. 

It was black; clinging fabric, long-sleeves, tight across her chest and and where it clung to her thighs. Turning her head left to right in the age speckled mirror leaning against the exposed brick of her bedroom wall, she decided it was acceptable. That she liked it even.

With an affirming nod, she began to tuck bobby pins into her hair, pulling loose strands from the front, curling them around her index finger.

Finn would tell her to wear it down. He had an affinity for tangling his fingers in her hair when they were at parties and liked brushing it out of the way when he wanted to press open-mouthed kisses to the back of her neck and the bare strip of her shoulders. But his fingers were cumbersome and though well-meaning, the incessant tugging was enough to give her a headache. She tried not to think about the way she might have been pinning it up in spite and that fact that the realisation tugged in her gut the wrong way.

_Clarke Griffin, the poster-child for a healthy relationship._

“Clarke!”

Smearing Nars Jungle Red, semi matte over her lips with practiced ease, she went in search of whoever had called, finding Raven in the middle of her loft — the loft Octavia liked to call it the 'med school bribe', what her mother had poured her “spare” Upper East Side money into to stop Clarke nagging about going to CalArts when everything was falling off the rails.

Standing in a strappy, slinky, low cut top hanging off her shoulders and tight, tight skirt clinging to thighs, her hair had been curled for the party, dyed lighter last month, draped over her right shoulder, Raven's face was contorted into something perturbed.

“Yes?” Clarke prompted, patting her own hair.

“Where’s the alcohol?”

“Champagne’s on ice, beer’s in the chiller and liquors on the bar,” Clarke checked them off on her fingers, watching her friend dig two bottles of Dom Perignon out of the ice bucket, condensation rippling on the outside.

She sighed utterly contented. “I love it when Mommy and Daddy top up your bank account.”

“Step-Dad,” Clarke uttered.

“Your walking trust-fund,” Raven corrected.

Clarke hummed. She would give her trust-fund, loft and the sleek, black Christian Louboutin’s she was slipping her feet into for her father, not the cheap replacement her mother had rolled in from who-knows-where. He was nice enough — not that she saw him an awful lot, or her for that matter.

She supposed people grieved in different ways, and she certainly wasn’t any better, drowning herself in the high-life and the med school she never wanted to attend, a relationship she didn’t understand with a boy she didn’t like.

“Buck up Griffin,” she felt Raven’s hand on her shoulder, a warm, sympathetic squeeze, “it’s New Year’s.”

“New Year’s,” Clarke swallowed.

* * *

_"It’s New Year’s Clarke, live a little.”_

_“I’ll have you know that this bottle of champagne costs two-hundred dollars.”_

_“That’s charming, but I don’t mean your fancy-champagne-trust-fund version of ‘live a little’. Come and stand in Times Square with me and the unwashed masses to watch a ball drop in a superficial ritual every New Yorker must experience in their life.”_

_“A true cynic at heart.”_

_“You love it.”_

_“I love_ you _.”_

* * *

 The elevator decleared its arrival and Octavia stepped out, all gold sequinned dress and hair in a top knot, bottle of expensive liquor in her hands. “I’m here bitches!” she squealed at a decibel that could shatter the champagne flutes in the cupboard. “You can commence partying!”

“How much of that have you had?” Raven scoffed.

“Two shots.”

“Five,” Bellamy corrected in his big-brother voice, to which his sister rolled her eyes.

“Whatever." That receives her a light cuff around the head that she returns in the form of a pinch in the side and Clarke feels the lump in her throat grow at the sibling banter. Octavia rights herself and straightens her dress around her thighs. "Where do I put this?" She sloshed the alcohol in the bottle and Clarke directed her to the line up of liquor on the bar. "Bellamy, Finn needs help with some decorations. He's out on the terrace." 

 

“I’m on it.”

“Thank you,” Clarke trilled.

She watched her friends work, her loft transforming with gold glitter and silver balloons, beads draped from the chandelier in wait for their guests — most of whom were strangers to Clarke.

It was at that point now; one text-blast away from being a free for all. A friend who invites a friend who invites three more, if only for the satisfaction of watching her mother pick through bottles and passed-out bodies on the odd occasion she checked up on her daughter. If Abby bought the loft to keep Clarke at a suitable distance from her — not as far as California but far enough that she could have 'couple time' with her new husband — Clarke intended to use it to its fullest extent.

Never mind that the spare bathroom wouldn’t be free of the stench of vomit for the next week.

That was what heavy-duty disinfectant and Finn was for.

She caught herself, repulsed. A sick, unhappy feeling cooled her stomach to glass. That was not what Finn was for.

Finn was soft, all shaggy hair and puppy brown eyes, his boyish charm endearing.

Maybe he even loved her.

She swallowed and rose from her perch on corner of the kitchen countertop, watching Raven line up shot glasses with glee on her face, and crossed the room to where Finn was backing down a ladder. She slipped her hand up the hollow of his back to tangle in the hair at the nape of his neck. “How’s it going?”

He turned to face her, she slipped her arms around his neck, crossing her wrists. “Good,” he kissed her light, nothing deeper than a peck on the lips because she was wearing lipstick and he knew her too well. “Good.” But it felt numb, and that hurt, like a punch to the solar plexus.

This was wrong.

She hummed, trying for nonchalant as she untangled herself form his arms and heard his confused noise. “Final touches,” she explained, gesturing vaguely to her face and hoping the barely there kiss had smudged her lipstick, “it takes a lot to look this gorgeous.”

He twirled a lock of hair around his forefinger. “You’re always gorgeous.”

She laughed sweetly and turned in the direction of her bedroom. 

She was standing at her vanity, shaping her lipstick with a makeup wipe and an antsy kind of frustration when Raven swung through the doorframe, the look on her face telling Clarke she had picked up on the weird tension that hung thick between her and Finn – the tension Finn didn’t even know about.

“Are you okay?”

Clarke studiously avoided the question, examining the way her lipstick had bleed. “This lip liner is crap,” she decreed, trying for nonchalant as she tossed it into the wire waste basket.

It wasn’t. It was MAC and expensive, but her hands were antsy and she felt suffocated. She needed to scream or base jump from a cliff. 

“Clarke,” she turned away but Raven’s hand was on her shoulder. "What’s going on?”

She wrenched her arm away and swallowed.

“Nothing,” she dusted her dress uselessly, “nothing, I’m fine.”

Octavia squealed from the living area, and Clarke assumed Lincoln had arrived, it was her excited, flirtatious squeal.

“Better go and save Lincoln from O, he’ll be outnumbered.”

“He has Bellamy. And Finn." 

It was a test. A test she failed when she flinched at Finn’s name.

Raven heaved a soft suffering sigh. “Sit down,” she ordered softly, and Clarke dropped to the end of the bed, her shoulders curling, defeated, crushing her heavy-knit throw in her palms. “What’s going on?”

Clarke swallowed, it stung with the force of keeping down a heavy sob. She slid a hand over her mouth, faking nonchalant contemplation but it hurt. Faking and faux smiles, sinking into the touch of a boy that should have been comforting but felt cumbersome and wrong — it was taking its toll, because sleeping with Finn’s body heat next to her was okay, but the thought she should feel more than okay when she tucked herself into to him made her antsy at night.

She turned her head to Raven and sniffed.

“I don’t love him.”

“Finn?”

Clarke nodded.

“Are you two having problems, or—”

“No,” Clarke shook her head, “no, we’re fine. We’re,” she paused, “we’re fine.” She sunk her head into her hands, fingers in her hair, dislodging little pins that sung out as they hit the hardwood of her bed room floor. “Jesus, I just — there’s nothing there, Rae. We’re fine. Not good, not great, not heart achingly in love, we’re fine. I don’t—” she gestured inarticulately and made an annoyed noise, “feel anything.”

“Clarke.”

It was Finn.

Her chest wracked with something hot and anxious but Raven had had the foresight to close the door when she came in. She wiped under her eyes and tried to pick up the broken peices of her smile and fix them into something presentable. “Just a minute.”

“People are arriving and we need to get the music going," he said through the door. 

“Get O to plug her phone into the AUX cord,” Raven ordered. Then as an afterthought, “make sure she plays real music.”

A noise of confirmation sounded from the other side of the door as Finn retreated and Clarke dissolved into makeup ruining tears. Raven leant over to the bedside table and snagged a tissue, folding it to dab at the smudged eyeliner and running mascara under Clarke’s eyes and rub slow circles on her back. 

“It’s been three years, Clarke,” she hummed softly, “maybe you don’t need to be heart achingly in love. Maybe you just need to be…comfy.”

“I don’t want to be comfy! I’m twenty-one years old, Rae, I don’t want to have to feel _obligated_ to hold my boyfriend’s hand. I don’t want to feel nothing when I kiss him. I want that feeling, I want the look O gets when she looks at Lincoln, I want —”

She couldn’t.

Thinking was too dangerous, it took her to places that shouldn’t be there.

Had it been three years?

“Clarke.” Raven’s voice was warning and she huffed, shaking her head, hopeless and desperate and utterly wrung out. She thought she was better but every time she did, the truth would scream around the corner like a runaway train and hit her in the gut. 

The realisation came as a low blow in her chest, something unexpected but wanted. It felt like returning to earth from an unbearable altitude and where the air wasn’t thin and the weight old suppressed feelings weren’t bearing on her.

She looked at Raven. “I’m not doing this anymore.”

* * *

Lexa Woods resented that Anya called her a hermit.

She had been fun in high school, the spontaneous, 'let's go on an adventure'type that had her roaming the boroughs of New York with a paint stained hand in her own. But law school aimed to kill and her social life had taken a fatal hit.

Not to mention the other thing.

The dusty libraries and stuffy professors of NYU law had taken precedent after that.

But let it be known that she was as stubborn as she was fun — and she _was_ fun —  so she stood in the elevator of a building she didn't recognise, a nice-ish top and a miniskirt scavenged from her friend’s wardrobe with stony determination in the cant of her chin. The coldest New Years on record since 1962 and here she was with her underwear practically on show.

She blamed Anya.

“Well don’t go having too much fun,” her friend said, her acerbic wit the highlight of Lexa’s day as usual, she made an unimpressed noised and eyed the seam in the elevator doors. 

They stepped out when they opened, straight into the elevator bay of the top floor of the building, ushered by the sound of pumping music and half-drunken shouts through the open door.

“Friend of a friends,” Anya explained when it was clear that Lexa recognised absolutely none of Anya's usual gang. They stood in the propped open door frame for a moment, arms crossed, surveying the carnage that had occurred. 

The bass beat was loud.

The song — Beyoncé’s _‘Partition’_ Lexa thought — rattled through her bones and vibrated alcohol in the glasses that were scattered on coaster-less surfaces around the loft. There were gold beads hanging from the chandelier on the ceiling of the open-plan living space, and a person dangling one handed. He was a dark, greasy-haired looking guy with a leather jacket and a bad boy smirk that irked Lexa the wrong way. The breakfast bar off the kitchen was doubling as an alcoholic bar, sticky with exotic liquors and expensive champagne.

Someone had broken a champagne flute and brushed the shards of glass to the side like it was nothing. A couple argued in the middle of the dance-floor.

It was Gatsby-esque, all of it. Too many sequins, too much glitter, pomp and affair, a ringing bass beat and all without purpose. Just a loft-full of uptown young adults playing teenagers, ringing in the new year in a clinging, skin-tight dress and expensive champagne. She didn’t know whose loft this was, but she imagined the host loitering in a different room, detached from the party, surveying their work from the terrace or the mezzanine, champagne in hand.

Anya always said she was a hopeless romantic.  

“Lexa!” Anya hollered. She indicated with a jut of her chin that she was going into the party, “I’m going to go find her.”

Mystery girl, Anya meant. Her friend who wasn’t her girlfriend.

Lexa nodded her acknowledgement, lips in a thin line and Anya scoffed at her. "You should smile more, Lex,” she gave her a good-natured pat on the shoulder, “make it a New Year’s resolution.”

* * *

" _I swear to god, Lexa, if you come near me with that pile of grease, I’m going home!”_

_“It’s double cheese pizza.”_

_“It’s carbs on carbs.”_

_“Only the best.”_

_“You should come on this clean eating thing with me. You can make not clogging your arteries your resolution.”_

_“Oh yeah? And what’s your resolution?”_

_“You."_

* * *

With an eye-roll, Lexa told — gestured — to her friend that she would see her after midnight, if not before, and delved into the throng of bodies, yelling her apologieson her way to the bar.

A petite brunette, giggly and tipsy, bumped into her, squealing a sorry before shouldering past Lexa to a broad-chested guy standing on the edge of the loft. He smiled when the girl shoved a fizzing pink cocktail in his face, and Lexa could see he would have rathered beer, but he took a sip and swallowed a grimace and Lexa huffed a chuckle. He seemed like the kind of guy who doted on the tiny brunette in the sequin dress. She watched the girl down her drink and hang off his arm, pulling him into the party, giggly and content and ached to feel the same. 

Something twinged in the furthest recesses of her chest, stuffed there with angry, confused hands and kept at bay with furious avoidance. She averted her eyes and went for an empty tumbler, grabbing the neck of the nearest bottle of alcohol and pouring.

A single drop leaked out. She shook the bottle and found it empty. 

“Here.”

A pale hand slid a just-opened bottle of Belvedere across the bench, Lexa poured a few fingers into the bottom of her glass mumbling, “thanks.” The perfunctory you're welcome was enough to elicit at gasp. She turned.

Clarke Griffin was beautifully tousled in a clinging black dress and hair down around her shoulders, messy like it had been tugged loose, and breathing in short little bursts so that Lexa could smell the alcohol on her breath — something fruity but strong.

Lexa watched her surprise, and imagined the same reflected in her face. She traced the straight line of her nose and the curve of her lips, the dip in her chin and the mole on her lip. The face she had memorised under her fingertips on sun-drenched mornings, giggles under sheets because her father was home and they wanted to spare him the embarrassment of coming in to investigate. The cheekbones she had caressed when she dried Clarke's tears, the jaw she brushed when the blonde had told her and she had pulled away.

“Clarke.”

Clarke breathed out, achingly calm, “hey.”

There was something sad in her eyes, blue through a hazy film of tears — that or Clarke was drunk but Clarke didn’t get drunk. Clarke was driven and responsible and Lexa’s greatest pleasure was dragging her plaid-clad honours student away from the hallowed halls of her stuffy school.

She swallowed. How things had changed.

“How have you been?”

Lexa cursed herself. Three years and _‘how have you been?’_ felt inordinately inaccurate. “Are you — are you okay?” She amended, which didn't feel much better.

Lexa was diplomatic. Good with names, easy with small talk and efficient at handling people and dismantling their demands but three years of spending her Friday nights with  _‘American Criminal Law: Cases, Statutes, and Comments’_ seemed to have rendered her incapable in a way only Clarke Griffin could do. She was struck suddenly by how she had changed as well.

The only thing that was the same about her was the inbuilt ability  to follow the curves of Clarke’s face blindfolded. 

There had been other dates after her, of course. There had been Costia from work with her easy smile and auburn locks, her pension for finding exotic, tucked away little restaurants on adventures through the city. She was everything Lexa was — everything she had been but left with Clarke because the blonde needed a little carelessness and adventure among her tragedies and if they had to end in heartache she would at least give Clarke something to remember her by. But together they felt wrong, like forcing a puzzle piece into the wrong slot. Guilty and unsure, with hesitant touches falling on skin, fumbles with zippers and awkward apologies where with Clarke everything had felt clear in the haziness of youth. 

“Oh.” Lexa watched Clarke’s throat bob with a swallow. “I'm fine. Good. I’m—” it took her an awkward moment to consider, “I’m good,” she decided. "You?”  

“Well Anya’s decreed I’ve become a shut-in, so…” Lexa tried for sardonic, but a version of unadulterated guilt flashed in Clarke’s features and she was hasty in correcting herself. “Law school tends to do that to you,” she explained, taking a sip of vodka and souring at the taste. “I think I’ve lost my edge," she admitted. 

Clarke looked saddened at the thought. The idea of the wild girl — _her_ wild girl — who had dragged her to Brooklyn and Queens and Times Square in the snow, being weighed down now by the textbooks and stuffy professors that were her high school reality. Lexa felt desperate to change the subject. “I heard you’re pre-med at Columbia now?”

Clarke nodded. 

“What happened to CalArts?’

“My mother.”

“Ah.” Lexa sloshed her drink. “And how is Abby?”

“In Cancún with her boy toy.”

She sounded resentful and it hurt. Clarke should never be resentful. It sharpened her features and made her all angles, hollow. It didn’t suit her at all. 

“Clarke!”

They both looked to the middle of the pseudo dance floor where a guy watched them wearing a clean black tee and too-white shoes, his hair just on this side of too long, and a boyish kind of all-American charm.

The boyfriend, Lexa assumed.

Clarke gave her an apologetic look, picking up two pre-poured drinks. “Sorry,” she winced, something reluctant in the way she was going about excusing herself.

“No,” Lexa shook off her apology. “It’s — by all means.”

She watched Clarke shoulder through the drunk and drunker partiers, how her hips swayed and her shoulder blades flexed under the mesh fabric at the back of her dress. She turned.

“Lexa?”

“Yeah,” Lexa’s answer was all too eager.

“I’ll see you later.”

It wasn’t a question but for a request it came equal parts pleading and certain, topped with a defiant cant of her chin so that Lexa wondered what had Clarke had to prove.

Regardless, she nodded and raised her glass, feeling the alcohol slosh, smile softening on her lips. “I’ll see you later,” she agreed.

If it were possible, watching Clarke walk away for the second time — even with the promise of _‘see you later’_ on her lips — was harder than the first. Heart wrenching, she dared say. She knocked back the vodka, cold and smooth, feeling the pleasant buzz, fuzzy like TV static or a blanket in her head. And, emboldened, she took a refill and turned to survey the party.

She squinted. Trying to find Anya in the crowd was like playing a drunken party game of Where's Waldo, but she spotted the dirty blonde of her hair and the low-cut sequin of her top eventually, crowding the lanky form of another into the corner of the living room: a dark-haired Latina in a strappy top and a tight skirt. Anya’s mouth was by her ear, moving slow and languid around torrid words and Lexa averted her eyes, ears pinking uselessly, lest she get in the way of what was looking to be a productivenight. She supposed one of them should get their midnight kiss.

She had kissed Costia at midnight once. They had had a patchy relationship the two of them, from colleagues to a summer fling that clung on through October and then Thanksgiving, counting on New Year’s to be a setting agent for something that wasn’t meant to be. But Lexa felt guilty around her. She had watched the look on Clarke’s face when the blonde had walked in to the cafe that day, seeing Costia with her smile and her hair, leaning over the counter in a way that wasn’t strictly innocent.

But Lexa hadn’t had an interest in it then.

It was only months later that their midnight kiss had been desperate and pleading, fingers snagging on collars, mouths hot. It had lingered unnecessarily and Costia had tucked herself into Lexa when they stopped to breathe, hands in her back pockets, head in her chest, pressing close like she knew it wouldn’t last and Lexa was surprised Costia couldn't see right through her. 

It wasn’t fair. Not to Costia, not to herself, not when she thought of blonde hair and cerulean eyes every time Costia kissed her, and the sad look of utter betrayal.

When Lexa had broken up with her a week later she was convinced there wasn't a soul in Manhattan that didn't know it was coming. 

An inadvertent elbow caught her in the back, Lexa stumbled and lost her drink.

“Oh my god, sorry!” Someone faceless apologised, a squealing blonde in a short-short dress, and Lexa’s drink was replaced instantly by something strong smelling and bright coloured. She was pulled by the wrist into the throng of partiers a beat later, swallowing away something unplaceable and searching for Clarke over the heads of the crowd.

* * *

Seeing Lexa had replaced the simmering, sweltering, anxious hangover within Clarke with something resolute. Both a soft comfort and the hard knowledge that things weren’t working and she wasn’t okay.

Life was about more than hoping a Band-Aid could heal something left to fester.

She took a sip of fizzing pink cocktail and strode over the Finn.

“Thanks, babe,” he drawled, taking the drink she offered him. He was drunk, pleasantly tipsy at least and there was beer heavy on his breath. It was irritating how handsy he got when he was like this. She disentangled herself from where he had tucked her under his arm. “Can I talk to you?”

Guilt burrowed hot and stinging into her spine because she saw it. Saw it like he was he was being led to execution and she wanted to sooth away the sadness in his puppy-dog eyes but that would be a cruelty unto its own, so when he nodded, she led him by the hand to her bedroom and shut the door. It shut out the music and drunken squeals to the dull thud of the bass beat, she felt the vibrations as her hand lingered on the door handle too long. She turned, back pressed to the wood panels, head dipped, watching Finn watch her. He ran his hand through his hair, long around his ears and in his eyes, then rubbed the back of his neck.

His just-opened beer sat on her vanity without a coaster.

“Say it,” he said. “You can say it.”

She fought down tears and wondered how he was so at peace with this. How he could think of her without animosity and admit the thing that tore strips off Clarke at night, what felt like constant roiling seas on her chest.

“I don’t want to," she pleaded, desperate. 

“Yes, you do.” He walked closer and she flinched but he was all soft hands and aching understanding and the words exploded from her chest like a runaway train — like what their relationship had become.

“We’re not working.”

“I know.”

She fell into his chest, blinking tears. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not!” She was angry with herself, not him, for thinking this would work. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair to you that I’m—”

His hands skimmed over her back, fingers delicate over the mesh fabric covering her shoulder blades. She felt the way they went reflexively to the white-blonde tips of her hair, then hesitated and anchored themselves at the small of her back. She sobbed. They stayed like that — curled into each other and grasping in a broken, desperate goodbye — for long minutes. Then, Finn hummed against the crown of her head.

“It’s Lexa, isn’t it?”

Clarke pulled away, wiping shaking fingers under her eyes, faint and breathy — all the confirmation Finn needed and he wilted.

“I’m sorry," she whispered. 

He nodded, agitated hands rubbing at his neck, tucking themselves into his back pockets. “I’m going to—” he gestured vaguely, “I’m going to go.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I’m going to go,” he repeated, crossing the room and pausing at the door, “happy New Year Clarke.” 

She wanted to be sick.

“Happy New Year Finn.”

It felt regretful and guilty, and Clarke did everything she could not to sigh in relief.

She watched the beer Finn had left set water rings into the wood and crossed the room to pick it up, swiping condensation off the surface and dropping it into the wastebasket to deal with later, then slipped out of her room in time to see Finn disappearing into the elevator. She gave him a half-hearted wave and sat back on her too-high heels, cursing the size of her loft for the first time since her mother had unceremoniously handed her the keys.

It was too big, there were too many places for people to be – overflowing from the open-plan living space, making potent concoctions in the kitchen. She was sure her bathroom had been locked non-stop since the party started, and not for the conventional reason. And if it hadn’t been an unspoken rule not to enter her bedroom, she was sure she would have just walked into two nameless people, half-clad with their tongues down each other's throat.

On further inspection, Raven was crowded in the corner, hands clasped around the neck of a lanky dirty blonde with a jawbone — Anya, she realised a beat later, Lexa’s friend who hadn’t changed in three years, which would explain the brunette’s surprising presence at her party. And Octavia was hanging off Lincoln who had an utterly in-love look on his face as he steadied his girlfriend who had been pre-gaming since six. It seemed she wouldn’t be seeking any kind of solace in them tonight.

A pungent odour could be smelt in the corner of the living room, where she was pretty sure two dorky looking boys were smoking a joint and that the smell of weed would be ingrained there for the next couple of days. Someone was physically _hanging_ from the chandelier, a girl Clarke didn’t know, shoes off, lacy panties on show and no one was telling her to get down because it was normal. There weren’t rules when you stepped into these parties, it was a known fact, and looking around, Clarke was struck with the utter ridiculousness of it. As if she had removed some sort of rose tinted glasses, but a grief-stricken, resentful version, steeped with self-pity and teenage pettiness.

Apart from Raven and Octavia, who she had met just months after things had come crashing down around her ears and were holding her hair back when she drunk herself stupid and held her when she was belligerent and crying, these people who she had surrounded herself with when her dad died were toxic. This persona she had staged for herself — emotionless and superficial — even more so.

She hated herself for this childish charade – for getting drunk every Friday night and having her mother walk in to her hanging over the toilet on Sunday morning, Raven and Octavia nursing hangovers at her side like three over-privileged, ill-meaning musketeers. She hated herself for hating her mother for moving on when she was lying to herself in the same manner.

At the bar, she lined up three shots, lime wedge, salt, and drowned them fast, earning a few cheers which she heeded no notice to, feeling the gentle buzz of the liquor arm her fingers and hit her head. She knew what she was about to do, and part of her felt achingly wrong for doing it, dumping Finn and running straight into Lexa, demanding forgiveness and a midnight kiss. It was the most wrong she had done in her life, and maybe she was making a mistake but, she figured, New Years was a time for reinvention. If she could discard the virulent shell of herself for the past three years and leave in among the glitter and empty beer cans on the hardwood floors come New Year’s Day, maybe, she would have a chance.

It took longer than it should have to find Lexa, long enough that people were well drunk and thrumming with the excitement of midnight drawing near, and Clarke was drawn up and anxious. If she didn’t do this now, she never would. But kept being pulled into squealing trios of party goers as she skirted the room, making an effort now because she wouldn’t be that person anymore. 

She extracted herself with ten minutes until midnight and a hot, anxious feeling crawling up her throat. Claustrophobia made her breathe hard, the sudden fear that Lexa had left was constricting her chest to nothing as she batted away an offered drink to step out onto the terrace, feeling the bite of the coldest New Years on record in fifty-ish years. What was it that the article on Facebook had said? Cover up all skin and refrain from drinking? Tugging the hem of her dress so it sat at least halfway down her thighs Clarke revelled in the fact that the mesh back on her dress and the buzz in her head meant she had done none of the following.

The cold was the kind that froze breath in your throat and the air ached to breath, low in her chest, but she pressed her back against the cold glass of the terrace doors and tried to breathe calm into her body.

The people who were situated out here were slower than the ones inside. The music was lost to the roar of Times Square and the cold ensured couples were clinched into each other's space for warmth, watching the way One Times Square and the festivities were visible through a convenient dip in two skyscrapers. By the railing, hips pressed flush with the reinforced glass, a lone figure dipped her head to the night.

“Lexa!”

It was like a plea, a prayer, desperate from bluing lips like Lexa was a flame and Clarke was hypothermic. A denim mini skirt clung to her thighs but she had had the foresight to wear a top that was long sleeved and when she turned to answer Clarke’s call, her hair fanned out, angelic.

“Clarke?” She said it the way she used to, clicking on the _‘k’_ in a way that felt achingly intimate, reserved for soft morning touches and late-night fumbles. Her chest was heaving and Clarke wondered why. 

* * *

_“Clarke.”_

_“I just came to get my things.”_

_“Don’t.”_

_“I can’t do this anymore.”_

_“Why? Clarke, tell me what I’ve done. We can fix it, I promise, just sit down.”_

_“I can’t._

* * *

“I’m sorry.”

Clarke," Lexa frowned, "I—”  

“I made a mistake!”

She forced the old, dusty words off her chest, breath pluming. It felt good to take the blame for something for the first time in so long.

She swayed.

“Are you drunk?”

“Maybe,” she admitted. “But I _am_ sorry,” she insisted, so vehemently, it felt like something she couldn’t express — the weight of her regret was leaden, bricks dragging her to the muddy depths of the Hudson.

“You left, Clarke.”

Clarke studied Lexa’s face: the proud of line her jaw, her highlighted cheekbones, the arch of her brow, and the way it was dipping under the weight of her frown. The volley of emotion in her eyes with the complexity of a hurricane, the fabric of an entire galaxy folded into an atom that Clarke couldn’t decipher the meaning of. Her makeup was natural, her lips dusky pink so that Clarke could see the freckle on the left side of her top lip. She imagined kissing it and wanted to cry, or throw up.

“I know,” she breathed, smelling beer and tequila and something fruity that was probably whatever pink and blue glass the person in the kitchen had pressed into her anxious hands. “I was _scared_. I was scared, and sad, and I didn’t know what to do. I was eighteen and my dad was dead and my mom,  _god,_ she was in Barbados with a man half her age and twice as rich, and you were there. You were there and you were sweet, and patient and I loved you so much it hurt. But then I saw you with her—”

“I’m so sorry, Clarke,” Lexa said, painfully earnest. “Nothing happened with me and Costia. Not then.”

Clarke nodded. She looked for something from Lexa — resentment, hate — but there was just this look of cautious hope and she bit back tears. “I know,” she assured her, curling her fingers into Lexa's collarbones. “But everything was breaking.  _I_ was breaking and I hurt, and I thought it was time to let old things die but I was wrong,” she wrung her hands, “ _god_ , Lexa, I've never been so wrong.”

“It’s been three years.”

“I’ll be better,” Clarke promised, sad eyed and revering. “I’ll communicate, I’ll talk to someone. We can take it slow or not at all, whatever you want. I owe you everything, Lexa. You’re everything.”

Clarke’s breath was warm, washing over the rosy tint of Lexa’s cheek. The tension of one-thousand, nine-hundred and five days pulled taut between them, a canvas stretched over a wooden frame like those stacked behind her headboard, covered in dark pigments painted with heavy, angry hands.

_‘I’m so in love with you.’_

They mouthed the sinful words in sync, hopeful and hopeless.

Times Square roared into a clumsily coordinated countdown below them, screaming out syllables in time with the generated ticking, a second closer to the new year. The ball, started its descent, and New York held its breath, the final ten seconds of the year drawn out into lifetimes – a birth, a death, a kiss. For a moment where the progression of time was so eagerly awaited, Clarke was astounded that it seemed to stand so still for them. She watched Lexa track the seconds on her face, eyes moving in a neat triangle.

_“Ten, nine, eight.”_

She wet her lips.

_“Seven, six, five.”_

Clarke breathed in.

_“Four, three, two.”_

Midnight exploded around them in fireworks and confetti and unadulterated hope. Lexa raised a palm to Clarke’s jaw and Clarke felt the new year burst in her chest, the cool press of lips and the heat of mouths. She sunk with shameful eagerness into Lexa and when Lexa’s hand skimmed up her shoulder blades to root at the nape of her neck, it didn’t set Clarke on edge. Instead she felt like her whole being was an open nerve ending, receptive to the endless possibilities of the meanings of this night and when she swallowed the little noises Lexa made she felt what it was to breathe.

Lexa realised what she was doing and leaned back a fraction, so that the kiss wasn’t as heady and heated as it had been. Instead it was soft and tentative, comforting. Clarke nodded as much as she could. This was good. A step forwards. Clarke wouldn’t do what her mother was doing – she wouldn’t play house with the first person she met after Jake died. She would go back, fix her mistakes and do the things she had shirked off because pettiness and grief wasn’t a legitimate excuse and toying with someone as precious as Lexa was unacceptable. She would do this the hard way because that was the only path to finding peace within the roiling waters that sat on her chest.

And maybe, this was just a kiss. No, this was definitely just a kiss, because three years was a decade and already Lexa felt different under her hands. Not bad, not wrong. Just different. The way her hair fell and how it was lighter than it had been at nineteen. How she kissed with more experience than she had when they were tangled in the pool house of Clarke’s parents summer home, bikini-clad and smelling of chlorine. But this just kiss was full of promise, light and hope for the new year. New memories and attention to old wounds. It would work this time, she was sure of it.

She tucked her fingers into the back pockets of Lexa’s skirt and watched Times Square erupt into confetti and stars.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos appreciated.


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